Inasmuch as the Internet causes humankind long-term harm, by subverting the foundations of our society, the free, open-source software goes in the same direction and aggravates the situation. Few notice this, but further I will unveil the root causes of this.
To form an opinion on the situation in modern IT, one has to possess skill and experience. Not everyone has this combination. Some possess one but not the other. Some aspects of IT are not openly advertised, and one can only learn of them, by boiling in this pot. Only then one realizes what is reality, and what is a slogan; what is claimed, and what is provided; what is desired, and what is delivered.
Let’s start at the very beginning: generic software emerged much later then the first computers. Initially, they ran only one or few purposely built applications that solved only one task each: computations of nuclear fissure or rocket propulsion, etc. Later, they morphed into firmwares and operating systems, and even later generic applications were written, which were compatible with a broad array of machines. None of that was free. On the contrary, the software cost a lot of money, and its quality was under strict control of vendors and customers. But that did not last long.
The bastion of quality was the first to fall. Having realized that development is complex and bugs are inevitable, nearly every vendor of commercial software adopted disclaimers of responsibility. Gradually, most of them included such caveats that their software is provided as-is, without warranty, in their license agreements. Although it was done primarily to discourage costly lawsuits, it is till notable. Still, commercial software remained mostly bug-free, for several decades. This practice was broken with the advent of free, open-source software. It burst into the IT market and offered itself to everyone willing, without guaranteeing absolutely anything, not even that it is fit for a particular purpose. If one pauses to think, then it is frightening, but everyone bit it, hook, line, and sinker. The situation is absurd: from their web pages, a project claims that it is something: an operating system, a programming language, a message queue, or whatnot, but its user agreement that few read because it is a long fine-print, negates all of that and contains a caveat that it is not even software but nothing at all, and that the user is entitled to nothing. Next, unforeseen consequences began to snowball as they always do.
For-profit organizations that create or employ software have long ago worked out methodologies for ensuring its stable operation. Thus, frameworks have been created, which ensure that software delivers its stated functionality and does not create issues. Mostly, these frameworks of which ITIL and SDLC are worth mentioning, consist of documentation, change control, assignment of responsibilities, operating procedures, coding standards, and many such elements of quality control and mitigation of risk from bugs or misconfiguration. Organizations that employ such frameworks train their staff to correctly apply them. This is necessary because people are inherently lazy and try to achieve the most by exerting the least effort possible. Are such frameworks employed by free, open-source projects? Seldom because they are costly. Anarchy and chaos rule them. Each does whatever they see fit and uses any practices that come to their mind. Try to challenge that, and in the best case scenario you will be shown the door.
On top of dry, technical skills the staff of commercial organizations have to have communication skill and use them properly, to deal with suppliers and consumers. They have to retrain regularly and prove their qualification. As a result, they accumulate volume of experience that allows them to deal with incidents that occur and to prevent those that can be prevented. Does this happen at free, open-source projects? Seldom does it. There, developers communicate or do not communicate with their users when and how they see fit. Seldom do they thank users for bug reports, and quite often they scold or block them. The culture of expecting servile attitude from users who are systematically reminded of their inferiority and superiority of the developer prevails in such projects. By carefully observing many such projects, for a long time, one may notice that some of them retain PR professionals who pretend to be unpaid volunteers but demonstrate info-war skills: special language, special methods of psychological warfare based on shaming and inversion of blame, and systemic approach to the defending of the project’s interests. This should lead us to question the non-commercial status of the project, but this is already beyond the scope of this article.
None is perfect. Such is human nature, and it cannot be changed. But by training and motivation, honey and vinegar, organizations goad their staff in the right direction. Desirable competencies such as calm and polite attitude towards users and customers, attention to their needs, the delivery of timely solutions to their problems, and valuable feedback on service delivery receive encouragement, whereas negative aspects such as rudeness, irresponsible behaviour, unwillingness to admit fault, or procrastination are discouraged. This is achieved by bonuses and promotions versus penalties. In the end, when incidents occur with the software of such vendors, their consumers usually receive high-quality support and resolution. Does this happen in free, open-source projects? Seldom it does. Glaring bugs that lead to undesirable or even harmful consequences sometimes not only remain unaddressed but do not draw any attention from the developer or entire team. They focus on their own goals, and your satisfaction is not among them.
How is this bad, one might ask? Kids are killing themselves all over my property. The boss calls the shots. It is their project, so they do as they see fit. Do not use it if you do not like it.
And this brings us to the whole point of this topic. On one hand, it is so, but on the other, human is a social being, just like ants, puffins, or antelopes. Human behavior affects our society and vice versa. Everything in our society is interconnected, and peer pressure makes members of collective to alter their own behaviour. New habits and modes of conduct are being formed. They permeate other groups. Our society is dynamic, and its conduct and that of its members changes to better or worse, as time goes on. The habits adopted by the maintainers of free, open-source software projects inevitably affected that of commercial projects, and regrettably to the worse, due to the simple fact that it is difficult for a human to consistently remain two-faced, for prolonged periods of time. Having tasted absolute freedom, in their free, open-source projects, staff member of a commercial organization is inevitably going to cut corners, at work. They are going to ignore users and peers, be rude towards them, and carry on with the habit of doing shoddy work and hoping for users to crawl on their knees to beg for bugs to be fixed. This means that there is no need for thorough testing. Also, such staff members have already wasted precious time that they could have used to learn better coding and testing practices.
This is how quality of software begins to slide down the slope, on a planet-wide scale, all while our society increasingly relies on it. Year after year, more and more processes and services are being transferred from humans and mechanical devices onto computer software, paper documents are being eliminated, and all aspects of our life become increasingly dependent on the proverbial software. Does this not mean that it should also become increasingly more reliable? No, because due to the increase in the number of developers who are involved in free, open-source projects, they remove themselves from the environment that positively affects their persons from the perspective of quality of their work. And this is where we should pause to think of what is important: short-term saving of trivial sums of money or long-term stability of the foundation of our society?
Few have seen or used as much of free, open-source software as I did. It will take too long to itemize it: operating systems, database servers, all sorts of communication servers and clients, development tools, and a whole bunch of other stuff. All of them without exception contained plethora of bugs. Of course, I, being naive, tried to provide feedback to their developers. Yes, I was young and foolish and believed the fairy tale about how developers are looking forward to bug reports. Imagine my surprise when I realized that few such receive warm welcome. And it was then when I paused and mused on that which I observed. It turned out to be those same, old human traits that we witness everywhere, from the lobbies of our apartment buildings, to public transit, to boardrooms, and social media: pride, greed, fear to lose face, arrogance, sociopathy, vengefulness, and many more that one should rather consult a professional psychologist about.
The staff of commercial organizations cannot afford luxury of exhibiting such traits freely because their bosses, shareholders, or regulators will not allow them. At free, open-source projects such traits flourish. There, developer has no one to expect a shout from, and they can set their own rules: you listen to users if you wish or block them if you do not. If you wish, you fix a bug or keep working on whatever you want if you do not. This is course of the day in virtually all of them. Most of them stink. One might ask me what those bug reports are then that are received favorably? The phenomenon is known as sock puppet. It means that the owner of the resource spins their project by publishing under different names bugs that they themselves found. This is the only reason why their treatment of such bug reports is complete opposite of real ones: one are welcome but the other is rejected, silenced, blocked, or deleted.
For those who do not work in the industry, I will provide examples of typical back and forth with developers of free, open-source software:
- Your software raises the following error.
- It should work.
- But it does not.
- Post the logs.
- Here.
- A, this means that there is a bug in library X.
- Okay, can it be fixed?
- Contact its developer.
- We are not developers, and we will not now what to tell them. You are in the best position to do so..
- Tell them Y.
Or:
- Your software raises the following error.
- In which environment?
- X.
- Try it in Y.
- We do not have an opportunity because Y is not installed on our systems. We do not use it.
- And I do not use X.
- Does it not bother you that your project may not work in the environments X and Z that users may install?
- I use only Y, and I do not have time to test X or Z. I am busy working on the next release.
They do not even consider that such attitude leads to their own degradation. For them, the only thing that matters is for their project to be posted online. They are playing, and common fascination with open-source inflates their ego into firm belief that everyone is supposed to play along. Thus, they are not different from drug addicts who stick their used needles into electric poles or drop them on playgrounds.
Let us pause to think who those mysterious developers of free, open-source software really are. What made them to start their project and to release it, free of charge? Indeed, some of them contain millions of lines of code that took thousands of man-years to develop. We must ask this question because our world literally spins around free, open-source software, but the answer is not very pleasant: the vast majority of those who maintain such projects are not driven by altruism. They cherish hope of personal gain, in various shapes and forms. Some only look to cast a lure for potential employers by demonstrating experience with some technology, get a real job, and forget about their project for good. Others want more: to replicate success of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the like. And so they spend their nights (if they work during the day) or days coding in a hope that it is going to take off the ground or another big player buys them out. Some succeed but their number is few, whereas there are millions of free, open-source software developers. And so they code and code but money do not pour in and instead these pesky users show up with their annoying bug reports. As time goes on they come to realization that highly lucrative software and IT services market is monopolized by a handful of giant, transnational corporations who can afford absolutely anything including taking intellectual property by force, and that they seldom need anyone else. And there such developers go off their rockers and show their true face.
We should have paused to think, as far back as in the 1970s. It was then when all those Robin Hoods in shiny armor popped up, allusively, of course, because they were smelly, disheveled hippies dressed in provocative t-shirts. But they mumbled something about universal freedoms and liberties, and for reasons unfathomable everyone became content and looked the other way. Few questionsed their ability to deliver something positive. When the society lost interest and got on with its daily duties, they showed their true colors: intolerance, hypocricy, lazyness, and corruption. Wiser ones would say: this was to be expected. Others would become surprised: how is this possible? They were rebels who revolted against the culture of consumerism! Here’s how: nobody’s words should be taken at face value until they are proven with deeds, whereas deeds of the free, open-source software are shady.
Here, we should pause to think of whether we entrust our well-being and future to the right persons. And I will answer: no, this should have never been allowed to happen to the same degree as the Internet should have never been allowed to become that which we have. All of this is absurd and contrary to the interests of humankind. Open source does not equal quality or reliability for simple reason that there is no one to vet it, whereas its free condition breeds only bad habits among its developers and creates problems for consumers. Decades of lenience towards the cult of inferiority of the user, the normalization of betrayal of their needs up to cancellation of everyone who is unhappy about bugs, have not been futile: generations of such developers have grown up who deem themselves superior beings above the users, whereas the quality of their code is clearly poor but it does not bother them. In real human society, the term for this is ‘spoiled’, but this is normal in the free, open-source software circles. You may rightfully become indignant: it cannot be so! There are so many good, free, and open-source applications around! But if you pause to think of how many really are out there, then you will likely only name a few, and if you pause to think of it, then you would realize that they are not your typical free products that everyone implies when they hear the term. All of them have been developed by those who got paid non-trivial sums of money for it or was ordered to develop them, whereas users were guinea pigs for its free testing or mules for its payload. However you slice and dice it, everywhere special interests or financial stimuli is king. It is sufficient to mention just one inconvenient fact: most of Linux kernel drivers were provided by IBM and not written by proverbial Linus Torvalds or other volunteers. This is important, by the way.
Absolutely anywhere and everywhere we observe rabid competition and niggard economy, and we should pause to think: how come among this penny-pinching regime suddenly sprouted oases of squandering that free, open-source software projects are? Each of us can tell of cases of business greed, but suddenly we see that! How come individuals or even collectives suddenly can afford to not get paid for many years or decades while they work on large-scale projects? Nothing can be more preposterous than assumption that it really is so. There are, of course, rare altruists who right some code, after work, out of the goodness of their heart, but generally there is always money trail or other kinds of interests in the perpetuation of free, open-source software due to the simple reason that its developers have to eat. They will either starve to death or dye of cardio-vascular conditions if not compensated for their efforts. Such is our body and society, and nothing can be done about it: it is energy conservation principle, entropy and other such laws of nature. But no, those individuals or teams type away, for decades, and state, if asked, that they are very busy working on the next release. This means that some invisible hand feeds them. What for?
Those who are being fed should keep working. They are on payroll. Administration monitors their performance. The quality of their product is being controlled. It is in someone’s interest. The scary part is that some are not being fed, and once they decide that they have a chance to make it big and proceed with development. But time goes on, but the project does not take off. Its users are either uninterested or unhappy with its bugs. Success no longer feels near. It is then when such developers of free, open-source software become menace to society because their Internet pages that had been designed with the soon success in mind still advertise their products as most wonderful, safe, user-friendly, performant, and so on, but all of that facade is dust, damp squib that has no substance behind it in the best case scenario or critical vulnerabilities, poor performance, insufficient reliability, and other such manifestations of lack of knowledge, aptitude, experience, or oversight, plus those pesky users come with their bug reports. And so the developers unload on them their accumulated anger while still trying to keep their face and pretend that the project has no issues because someone might still come and buy it.
Worse is if developers sneak from free, open-source projects into real economy. They bring along the burden of bad habits. This is akin to adopting a dog from a shelter who used to be beaten by its alcoholic previous owner: it honestly wants to love its new owner but still bites its hand because it is afraid to be beaten again. In their own free, open-source project, those developers were big bosses who decided their users’ fates, but suddenly they have to obey the rules and treat every user with respect. Do you suppose those developers are going to be happy? Of course not! They only come to make a coin, and they begin to unobtrusively to pull the blanket and shove other chicks out of the nest like cuckoo, consciously or not. Such is human nature, and nothing can be done about it: people influence one another when they interact. The management has to correct their behavior, and that takes time and effort, whereas were they to start their career in normal economy, they would have adopted the right habits in the very beginning.
Admittedly, I cover this topic from the point of view of consumer in particular and society in general. I did not take the interests of the free, open-source software developers into account, until now, because they belong to the same category as the homeless or drug addicts. I pity them but realize that they are undesirables. I do not advocate for herding them to concentration camps or hauling them off to gas chambers. No, this is not what our goal should be! As a society, we can still do better than ignore the Internet or developers of free software. It is very unfortunate that we turned away and looked the other way. We should have acted appropriately but just as is the case with the Internet, we allowed it to do its own thing and bad habits to have the upper hand.
What should we do about that? We should have used the tried and tested solution that allows us to survive, for the last couple centuries, namely standards. We do not get electrocuted every day because there is a standard for electric insulation. It is not that there are no standards in IT, but there are frightfully few of them. It is Wild West with all of its quirks. Who succeeds in it? One who got a jump-start (whose parents had access to know-how, at a big company, or who had influential friends or well-connected ancestors), who was told a good idea, who were ordered to implement a certain project, or who dared to go break the law and was let off the hook because someone decided that they can be more useful at large rather than in prison. These categories are the only ones who later tell gullible audiences high tales of assembling their first computer in their garage and of sudden success that it brought. And so their exploits inspire crowds of copycat followers who do not give two damns about standards because the perspective of making billions is smiling at them from the horizon. Should our society let things take their course? Of course it should not! Had scientists and inventors of the past done that, we would have had different voltage and frequency of AC current in the wall outlet, in every city. The width of the rail tracks would have been different, in every province. The layout of every keyboard would have been different. No threads would have matched between nuts and bolts. This is the kind of circus that the IT industry is at the moment.
We are running out of copper, vanadium, germanium, and many other elements. Our ocean is polluted, and fish contains plastic and mercury. The air in our cities is harmful. Rats besiege us. Our crops are contaminated with pesticides. All of this drives countries to measures quite drastic, but inexplicably we completely ignore the fact that our IT industry wastes non-trivial sums of money to create software that works slowly and inefficiently, contains bugs, and wastes gigawatts of energy. Developers of free, open-source software are some of leading contributors to this waste: they cast the lure, and we swallow it, whereas it would have been wiser to pay for the software but not only receive a bug-free product but also leverage on the developer.
How can I possibly know all that? Not by choice! Partially, I had become enthusiastic about free software, having believed its altruistic nature. Only after its developers have been showing me their true face, for decades, did I get the wake-up call and become cognizant of the sheer number of bugs in their code. Other factors contributed, but this was the main one. Today, in 2025, many free, open-source products that I use for close to 30 years, still contain the same bugs that I had reported to their developers, in the very beginning. They may be as critical for me or other users, as it gets, but this does not mean that they will ever be fixed. Year after year, I had to find ways to make free software work in various solutions that I developed, and inevitably I had to become familiar with many projects and their developers. With rare exceptions, that left bad taste and memories. There are enough fingers on one hand, to list those with whom I enjoyed working.
What about donations, you might ask? Nothing. I spent thousands of dollars on them, but even then they might rudely turn on me were I to dare to insist that some bug should be fixed. I still chuckle when I recall exactly this happen, with one of the famous projects that is considered poster-child of them all.
What should the standards be, in this field? To begin with, there must be restrictions on the use of software that is provided with no guarantee. The IT industry is spoiled by such opportunity: to roll out God knows what and shirk responsibility. If we do not allow the manufacturer of electric shavers do that, then why do we allow the vendor of software that our public transit runs on? Next, we should define criteria that the software must satisfy, from the perspective of transmission of packets across the Internet. We should define requirements to software that can be used in environments, based on their purpose and impact expressed in the number of their users, and suddenly we will likely find out that only commercial products satisfy them. “Corruption!” one might shout, but this is not the case. Consider this: free, open-source projects have no known mechanisms of quality control on top of the personal prowess of its developer. We have already covered the lack thereof.
Indeed, we do not allow random entities to pump arbitrary liquids or gases into our watermains or gas lines. Internet is not too different other than it is global, i.e. the potential for harm is much higher. But we still allow any unknown, random entities send any packets to anyone, anywhere. Why do we? Do we have not enough problems as it is? Are we content with periodic hacker attacks and data breaches? Is it acceptable, that hundreds of millions of personal records fall into wrong hands, from time to time, including due to the utilization of free software? Are we content that millions of us become victims of crime only because we blindly follow dogma imposed on us by God knows whom that dictates that everyone must be able to twitter or instagram their life, around the clock? We became like drug addicts who lost everything human in them for the doze of the Internet or free software.
Next, it would benefit us if we required standard libraries to be used. This means that developers have to be trained on them. If only you knew how many times the IT industry reinvents the wheel! You would have become frightened and asked: are our taxes and prices so high, partially because software developers around the world write the same boilerplate code, over and over? And I will say, to a degree, yes.
Erstwhile, I wrote about the zoo that our park of programming languages have become. Today, every blighter wants to use some exotic language. Allegedly, standard languages do not do it for them. Nothing can be further from truth! C-style languages such as C++, C#, and Java cover 100% of software development needs of human society. But no, exotic languages propagate themselves like mold, being only different from the former languages in being not them. One may ask, so what? It is that with each new one, the worldwide collective of developers fragments itself and its experience! The human civilization apparently learned no lessons from the tower of Babel. This requires the training of themselves and their educators, which costs huge sums of money yet multiplied on trivial things like mops and light bulbs. Having trained developers in two languages instead of one, we have wasted time that they could productively work in the economy. The same goes about function libraries, frameworks, and many other products. The evil is in the lack of patience: instead of creating a well-designed and reliable solution, some rush to use whatever comes along, to deliver the immediate task and get a browney point. This is how software chimeras and mutants are being born. If we pause to think, it becomes obvious that each programming language, its basic libraries, and the development environment duplicates the previous ones. Are we completely out of our minds, by allowing such waste?
We are to take partial blame for the current state of affairs, or rather our education. Our universities give students assignments to create a new programming language, to teach them to use syntax analyzers, and some get an idea that it is acceptable to release their assignment to the world. Or they create a new database management system, etc. Instead of stopping them in their tracks, we allow it, and later we observe the garden variety of programming languages, on job boards. Due to the proverbial human behavioural traits, those languages find followers among those who want to be different and famous, and later they proceed to argue about which of the languages is better and how exactly, and this turns into another circus. The recent graduates do not yet have life experience and harbors illusions that the new fad is going to solve all their problems, whereas the old-timers have heart conditions and are reluctant to become target of bullying in response to their balanced and well-articulated concerns. In the end, all of us pay the price.
Our society at least tries to stem undesirable behaviours such as drug addiction. We should have controlled the Wild West of IT and the software that we use, needless to say control our communication channels. This alone would have had a chilling effect on those who flood the global software market with their free products. Yes, we might miss something, but pause to think: were so many of those who presently spend their time writing free, open-source software, being motivated by a remote chance of monetary success, not do so, where would have they applied their energy? Could it be in real economy? Were they to charge money for their work, would not have they become better off? Would not have that benefited the rest of our society? Yes, they are preoccupied with creativity and vanity, and they want to write a program and publish it, for the world to see. Let them do it! But no one should use it until it is established that it follows the standards of quality and safety, being supported, and will continue to be if the developer goes out of rotation. And were all of this to be provided, our bad neighborhood with druggies and prostitutes might suddenly improve and become quite habitable. Our society is still quite capable of using positive stimuli in IT, if it is only willing.
This brings us to the review of another important aspect of free, open-source projects: why do their developers work on them? Is it because they do not possess sufficient skills for productively working in real economy, for traditional employers, or for their own businesses? What has lead to this? Could it be that they have received wrong upbringing or education that does not allow them to be hired? Allow me to remind you: our economy is in austerity mode. Businesses count every penny, in their urge to defeat competition and turn profit. Given opportunity to make money, they would have certainly sold their products instead of giving them away. Apparently, they cannot. This means that their software is not good enough for someone to pay for it. I testify that it really is so! Why do we then agree to use it? We should not. By doing so, we become our own worst enemy, by lowering standards and sometimes even driving out of business really good vendors.
Objections can be sometimes heard against tighter control of human interactions, that prohibition does not solve problems. But we still prohibit the sale of insufficiently insulated electric appliances or medications with harmful side effects. So, some prohibitions are good. It is complete lack of control that is harmful. If the status quo is kept, the situation will only get worse with time.